FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Virginia Rutter / Sociology @ Framingham State University vrutter@gmail.com Sociologist Jill Yavorsky conducted a field audit on gender discrimination in hiring and shares this early exclusive summary and commentary with CCF. Her brief report, Hiring-related Discrimination: Sexist Beliefs and Expectations Hurt both Women’s and Men’s Career Options, shows that men as […]

Hiring-related Discrimination: Sexist Beliefs and Expectations Hurt both Women’s and Men’s Career Options A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Jill Yavorsky, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Organizational Science, University of North Carolina Charlotte January 16, 2019 Although many sexist prejudices have weakened over time, gender stereotypes still influence employers’ decisions […]

3q: Per Coontz, Equality is an Agenda for All Working People, Not Just Feminists Virginia Rutter interviews Stephanie Coontz on the new Council on Contemporary Families brief, Hiring-related Discrimination: Sexist Beliefs and Expectations Hurt both Women’s and Men’s Career Options, by Jill Yavorsky. VR: You edited Jill Yavorsky’s brief on hiring-related discrimination, where she reports […]

A briefing paper prepared for Council on Contemporary Families by Alan Barber, Director of Domestic Policy, Center for Economic and Policy Research, and Virginia Rutter, Professor of Sociology, Framingham State University. August 22, 2016 Welfare reform hits 20 this month. The Center for Economic and Policy Research has done much work examining how full employment […]

What Helps Women Entrepreneurs Flourish? A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Sarah Thébaud, University of California at Santa Barbara November 5, 2015 Most Americans agree that entrepreneurship is an important component of economic growth and job creation. Small businesses accounted for two million new jobs last year, and innovative start-ups […]

National surveys and other studies continuously tell us that work is a major source of stress for Americans. But this study has found that people have significantly lower levels of stress at work than at home. These low levels of cortisol may help explain a long-standing finding that has always been hard to reconcile with the idea that work is a major source of stress: People who work have better mental and physical health than their non-working peers.

Today the Council on Contemporary Families releases the third set of papers in a three part symposium marking the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. The first two sets of papers described changes in America’s religious and racial-ethnic landscape in the half century since it became illegal to discriminate on the basis of religion, skin color, national origin, race, ethnicity or gender.

It’s appropriate that we turn last to how women have fared since passage of the Civil Rights Act, because the addition of the word “sex” was a last minute addition to the bill. Opponents hoped — and supporters feared — that threatening to make discrimination on the basis of sex illegal would kill the bill, and when it passed anyway, few policymakers took the sex provision seriously. Although the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission immediately moved to ban job ads that specified a particular race, it refused to do the same for the sex-segregated want ads that were the norm in 1964.

Fifty years ago this week, on June 10, 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, amending the earlier Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, to “prohibit discrimination on account of sex in the payment of wages by employers.” So, how’s that going?

By Sheryl Sandberg Chief Operating Officer, Facebook and Founder, www.leanin.org For more information, or to arrange an interview, contact Andrea Saul: press@leanin.org In 1947, Anita Summers, the mother of my longtime mentor Larry Summers, was hired as an economist by the Standard Oil Company. When she accepted the job, her new boss said to her, […]